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Chôko Iida in Yogoto no yume (1933). Frame enlargement: Silent Era image collection.

飯田 蝶子
Chôko Iida

Born 15 April 1897 in Asakusa, Tokyo, Japan.
Died 26 December 1972 of lung cancer.

Married cinematographer Hideo Shigehara, 1927; until Hideo’s death, 8 December 1967.

Chôko Iida began work in motion pictures at Shochiku Kinema Kenkyû-jo in January 1923, where she worked for the majority of her career. By the 1930s she was part of the stock companies of Shochiku directors Yasujirô Ozu, Yoshinobu Ikeda and Mikio Naruse. Perhaps overlooked today, the versatile Iida could convincingly play a harsh, petty business woman in one film and a heartbreakingly compassionate mother in the next. Like the rest of the Japanese motion picture industry, Chôko successfully made the transition into sound films in the 1930s.

Iida left Shochiku in 1945 and continued film work as a freelance actor, appearing in films for Yasujirô Ozu (Record of a Tenement Gentleman [1947]), for Akira Kurosawa (Drunken Angel [1948] and Stray Dog [1949]), and for others. At the end of her life, Chôko Iida had appeared in more than 300 motion pictures and television appearances.

References: Website-IMDb; Website-Wikipedia.